i originally received the email for the 20% discount so it may not work for everybody, but i paid $39 total...$50 - $5 for an affiliate club discount and then 20% off of $45 plus the $3 processing fee.

what gets old is being hit up for more and more money each year for services which show no sign of improving or even deteriorate. if you play lots of tournaments there is plenty of reason to join, if not there is not enough value there to justify it for me anymore. i have said a million times that the pdga needs some sort of low cost essentially non-playing membership for those who don't wish to play tournaments on a regular basis. they have seen fit to offer discounts to former members but nothing for those of us who have stuck around all these years.

i have been a member since 1995, have run roughly 30 pdga events from c tier to a-tier, was regional coordinator at one point and then state coordinator for the entire time the position has existed prior to last year, put 4 courses in the ground myself and designed/contributed to the design of at least 10 more and i am damn sick of being asked to pay $75 a year in membership when all i get out of it is cheap insurance for my tournament (the main thing the ORG does well), an obviously flawed rating system, and a website (which is the pdga's primary interface with the vast majority of their membership) which doesn't work worth a rat's ass.

I agree that PDGA is far from perfect, and I'm also in accord with many of your criticisms. And I haven't been shy about telling it the way I see it, either. I've told members of the board that I thought it had only achieved the status of being a "glorified tournament league," and that it has failed to make itself relevant to non-tournament players (the sanctioned kind), thus isolating itself from over 90% of disc golfers. As for me personally, I play at least 10X more non-sanctioned tournaments/leagues than PDGA-sanctioned tournaments. On top of that, I would judge myself to be more PDGA-active than 96% of all disc golfers...so in summary, they're totally missing the boat by piddling around with only a tiny fraction of the sport.

But if only the regular tournament players will fund it, the entire organization will atrophy and contract. I think their active membership is only roughly 20% of total PDGA numbers (50K as of last year)...this is a very low rate, and they should already have panicked and done some major overhauls...they're way too late to respond to this membership crisis, and I still don't see any sense of urgency from PDGA's board to address it.

Still, there are reasons to continue supporting PDGA, even without playing tournaments. I want PDGA to exist, even in its imperfect form. I'll give them my membership dollars just for maintaining the int'l disc golf center and the courses around it...even if I never go to Georgia. They keep a database of tournaments and events and courses, which is very nice to have. I like getting a magazine, even if it isn't always the best (still, there are nuggets in there that I enjoy...especially the history stuff). They do a fair enough job with rules and standards (although some may need further reform in upcoming years). I don't really care about ratings, or their accuracy. I like that there is some organization facilitating big tournaments and developing competition between top players. Etc..